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A roundup of what The Globe and Mail's market strategist Scott Barlow is reading this morning on the World Wide Web.

The hard paywall at the Financial Times is particularly aggravating this morning because their in-depth feature on Saudi Arabia's decision not to cut oil production is just tremendous. Canadian investors with an even remote interest in the oil patch should beg, borrow, steal or even – gasp – buy a paper copy of the FT.

The feature report adds considerable context to familiar factors like global market share, including the new wrinkle that it was Chinese demand that played a large role. The report also argues that OPEC significantly underestimated the viability of U.S. shale reserves.

"The Saudis doubted the sustainability of shale, given its production costs – break-even prices range between $30 and $90 a barrel for shale, compared with Saudi oil, which costs less than $10 a barrel to produce… The Saudis 'did not believe the actual potential of the U.S. shale revolution,' says Leonardo Maugeri, a former executive of Italy's state-owned oil company Eni, who last year briefed Saudi officials on their new rival. 'They totally underestimated the resilience of this oil.'"

"The big drop: Riyadh's oil gamble" – Financial Times (subscribers only)

See Also: "Oil: a bounce, not a recovery" – The Economist

Citigroup's research department commissioned a study that concluded that almost half of U.S. jobs will be threatened by automation. The authors – academics from a number of prominent universities – conclude that the current ongoing technological revolution will cause more social and economic upheaval than the industrial revolution.

"The upcoming digital age may cause more upheaval than previous technological revolutions as it is happening faster than before and is fundamentally changing the way we live and work. Technology in the 21st century is enabling the automation of tasks once thought quintessentially human: cognitive tasks involving subtle and non-routine judgment. Through big data, the digitisation of industries, the Internet of Things and industrial and autonomous robots, the world around us is changing rapidly as is the nature of work across occupations, industries and countries."

"Technology at work" – Citigroup

FT Alphaville's Cardiff Garcia uses the Citi report as a launching pad for a deeper comparison between now and the late 18th century.

"Roughly seventy years passed after the onset of the Industrial Revolution before real wages started climbing, and a full century passed until real wage growth started outpacing productivity growth. During that time, living standards actually worsened for many workers as they moved from the country to the cities, mainly because sanitation was so appallingly bad."

"Jobs, automation, Engels' pause and the limits of history" – Garcia, Alphaville

Duncan Weldon provides a highly useful summary of the global economy in 10 charts. The first few are Eurocentric, but the tables showing declining optimism for global economic growth (especially emerging markets), charts predicting the timing of Fed rate hikes and strength in the U.S. dollar are really interesting.

"The global economy in 10 charts & 2 rules" – Weldon, Medium

Tweet of the Day (easiest selection ever): "@reformedbroker Thirty Signs You're On Finance Twitter http://thereformedbroker.com/2015/03/10/thirty-signs-youre-on-financial-twitter/

Diversion: "10 terrible movies that absolutely everyone should see" – i09

Follow Scott Barlow on Twitter @SBarlow_ROB

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